Congress Simulation Activity

Hello and thank you so much for purchasing my Congressional Simulation Activity! I have used this activity to supplement instruction on the nature of congress and lawmaking in the United States. I have found students find this activity fun and engaging, but it also serves as a great touch point to explain concepts like deal-making, political strategy, party politics, and party whips. I hope you, the teacher, enjoy it, too!

For the activity, each student will represent the Senator of a state. For simplicity, I loosely correlated each state to their politics today, and tried to make just as many “red” states as “blue” states. There are 8 issues, 4 that are supposed to represent issues that are traditionally Republican stances, and 4 that typically represent Democrat stances. You can elect how much you wish to wade into the issues themselves. This isn’t designed to be a “debate” activity, but could easily be adapted.

First, I recommend running through the instructions slides and taking questions. Explain that the object of the game is to get re-elected, and to do that, students will need to work to pass or defeat these 8 bills (depending on the preferences of their citizens)

1 zip file with:

-- Teacher Guide word document

--A 16-slide PowerPoint

-- An Excel spreadsheet